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Updated 1 month ago, August 31, 2026

Beth Knight never agreed to be filmed. She didn’t even know she had been — not until the clip surfaced in her own TikTok scroll, presented as proof that a stranger had “picked up” a teenager.

She was 17, waiting out a missed train at London’s Waterloo station, when a man approached her. He talked at her for roughly 14 minutes, until her train arrived. “I just see you now, like, find you attractive, so I wanted to say hello,” he said in the recording. Her replies were short. Early on, she reached for a line many women know too well — that she had a boyfriend — but he didn’t stop.

“In that moment, I didn’t know I was being recorded, so it was purely just, I need to get out of the situation,” she told ABC’s 7.30.

What she couldn’t see was that the man was wearing smart glasses — the kind that can record people without their consent. Days later she went looking, typing “picking up girls” and “Waterloo” into the app’s search bar until she found his page. She recognized his voice and his face. The encounter had been posted as a pickup success, “framed as, like, this win when I know in the moment I was incredibly uncomfortable.”

Her point isn’t only about consent. “When you don’t know you’re being recorded, you can’t control your image in any way,” she said. Had he used a phone, she could have told him to stop. The glasses took that choice away.

Other women replied with their own versions, on public transport and at work. “I think the more widespread they become, the more people are going to be exploited and harmed by them,” Knight said.

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